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In Paradise Anonymous (Moon Tide Press 2023) Oriana Ivy addresses the essentials: our eternal longing for home, the power of language, and the irresistible urge to push beyond the limits of the ordinary. Theology insists there was a primal paradise, lost by our own fault, long ago, but that we still remember, that haunts us with the ache of absence, the longing to return and claim once more as home. As a young woman, Ivy left her native Poland for the promise and adventure of America., unexpecting the loneliness of separation, of questioning what her life would have been had she never made that decision. Her move left her forever an exile from home, from her first language, her mother-tongue, and from the first paradise of childhood. Homesickness for that magical first world never ends. In “All Souls” she imagines “Warsaw fog/ is the dead, coming back/ to seek their old homes—wanting to touch even the walls…embrace the trees...kiss/even the railroad tracks. In “Wheatchild,” one of her most lyrical poems, she remembers that wondrous state of childhood, naked and open to the world that is all new and all at once, that seems beyond mortality: the soul has no past tense. Laughing, I step out, A child clothed with the sun, into the arms of the world. This homesickness is the human condition, we are all exiles from our first paradise, all born into the world tasted and shaped by our first words, words that will always have that numinous glow of first breath, like Adam’s language, naming the new world. Ivy knows language is our best magic, words are her “Key to the World.” Adam’s first words are “lost/like the face of the Unknown God,” and we “grieve” our homelessness (Adam’s Language) and yet “A larger self” realizes all words are magical keys, All languages are Adam’s. Beloved, you are home. Language creates the human world, and is itself our home, one with many stories, many rooms. In “Let There Be Light” Ivy remembers Aunt Henia, Learning her eighth language, said that with every variety of speech we gain a new soul. Endlessly fascinated with words and their power, Ivy is greedy for more, knowing Languages multiplied because the universe needed many mirrors of sound. Enchanted, those many mirrors cast for her a spell that echoes and expands: she is thrilled by “amalgam” and “verloren,” the taste and sound of them like a lover’s caress, a poet’s arsenal of miracles, where “every word” is “a name of God” pulling light out of darkness, creating worlds. This is the gift that brings the angels to envy us our bodies (Angel Envy,) our “mortality/ that beautiful blood flower” (Archaic Penelope.) Paradise is neither lost, nor in the future, beyond death: You see, they never left Eden, the man and the woman, the oldest story in the world. Clouds billow into shapes of animals yet unnamed. The garden is here outside our window– (Paradise Revised) What we have is not the promise of immortality, but the beauties of incarnation, of memory and our own passion to speak, to sing, to name the world, the human world, into being. We are already here, at home, in the miraculous, where Memory is a translation from a dead language she waits for us forever that shimmering young girl, (Verloren) where we sing, “Not Like the Birds,” but like the poet’s father, paralyzed and unable to speak, who begins instead to sing, to become luminous, “A voice singing in the ruins.” In the darkness of our brief lives we become light, torches bright as stars, like Saint Joan, in her final translation into flame (Saint Joan Speaks to Me) telling us “Truth is a torch,” that We are all burning. Be a brighter fire. A challenge Ivy makes her own, again and again, with these shining poems.